First thoughts on almost final render

Saw the animation being pieced together today. I am really impressed with some of the scenes within the animation, and I think it's clear that people have put a lot of effort into their work. I think that some of the scenes could have benefited from some better camera work though to liven them up a bit, but the animation is looking quite good so far. I like the choice of music, though I think that it definitely needs to liven up a little bit when all of the action kicks in. Can't wait to see the final version.

I am also really annoyed and also very sorry for my scene not being rendered by today. The scene was just too much for my computer to render. Also, when I set up 6 computers to render the scene at uni today, 5 out of the 6 crashed. So the last option I have left is to leave it to Tim to see if his powerful computer can handle it. Fingers crossed...

Not going too well

Ok, so I have been trying to render the gun deck scene all damn weekend with no success. To sum it up, my computer comes up with an error and closes whenever I try to render the scene. I have managed to render 1 frame out of a total 350. I also tried getting into the computer rooms today to set them rendering but found that everything upstairs in the sawyers building was locked. My only hope of rending this scene is to get in tomorrow and set this thing up on a lot of computers and hope that it renders. Failing that, give it to Tim to render and then see if I can slot the scene into the final animation some time in the week, as I really want this scene to be included as it isn't just my work that went into making it. :/

Gun deck

Ok so I am really underway with animating this scene now. I have the camera follwing a path to the cannon. One of the enemy ships then goes past the hole and the cannon shoots. I just need the final sea (not sure if the one I downloaded of humyo is the final one), the sky, the crew and some smoke effects (mine are a little shabby).

The other thing is that I'm not sure if I will be able to have the lamps swinging as I originally hoped, as the rendering is pretty harsh because of all of the effects. I'm not sure if Tim's super computer will be able to handle this, but the ones at uni and my computer here are not up to it. :/

First preview of the gun deck

Ok so this is the gun deck that sadigh made. The cannons are from James Ticket and I've added in the lights, the rammer and sponge and then temporary background. The floor in this picture is also temporary, and is being made by Tim.

Bucket

Just a simple bucket with a slightly less simple rope handle.

Bowl

Just a simple bowl.

I love lamp

Been working on this lamp tonight. If you have looked around at all of the pictures from inside HMS Victory then you would have seen this lamp everywhere. Anyway, the lamp didn't take all that long to model, but the lighting is a different matter. I have spent the majority of the night just playing with all of the lighting settings to get this to look right. Changing the advanced effects like the volume lighting and the lens effects to get the right look. I don't think its too far off at the moment. In these few pictures the light is in a fairly dark environment, but I don't think I will need to worry too much about this in the final animation as it all happened in daylight. So it's not like these lights will need to be lighting everything up inside the ship.
This is just the lamp thrown into a scene with my barrels. The lighting effects on this image were the original ones. The previous image is the result of a few more hours of tweaking. To be honest though, a lot of the time I didn't actually know what was doing what. The things that worked one moment decided to stop working another. Very confusing stuff.

I do realise that on the modelling front, things are going a little slowly. But at the same time I am also mapping things and playing about with lighting and animation. :)

P.s. I realise that the mapping of the walls in the background is pants, but I just slapped it on because I needed some walls. So don't be worried that the walls look crap. ;)

Another good site for pictures

http://hubpages.com/hub/HMS_Victory
This site has a few good pictures of HMS victory and of Nelson. If you also follow the source links underneath the photo's then they will take you to sites that have even more useful photos.

Testing

Just a render of the chain shot hitting a mast. I didn't bother with trying to get the mast to break off or anything, that's a bit more complex. I just wanted to see how the chain shot reacted. Plus I'm not actually an animator. :D

Ok, blogger isn't letting my video show up, so here is a link to it:

http://www.wedgies.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mastrender.avi

Gunpowder

One of the things that I had to model for this project were the sacks of gunpowder. After having a few attempts and realising that sacks are actually quite hard to model, I decided to do some more in-depth research on what was actually on board HMS Victory. As it turns out, the gunpowder was not actually stored in sacks at all. It was all stored in barrels, 784 to be precise. This is also backed up by many of the photos of the cannon deck not actually showing any sacks at all, only barrels. The only provisions on-board the HMS Victory stored in sacks were oats, beans, pulses and peas. All the water, beer, wine and vinegar was also stored in barrels.
So, no gunpowder sacks.

Balls

Cannonballs, that is. Just modelled a few. These are the 2 diferent textures that I used. The left is a steel texture from a cannon that I have made into a map that can be tiled. The right is a standard rust map. I think I prefer the one on the left. It's pretty easy to change maps though. So this isn't a problem.

Next up, I had a go at the 'angel' and 'chain shot' types. Here is the outcome:

Just noticed how the inside end of the rear part of the angel one on the left looks a bit naff where you can see the material being tiled. This rust material is much smaller than the iron one though, which is why it needed to be tiled a bit more to not look as stretched, but I think we will go with the iron one anyway.

Lastly, I had a play around in reactor, for the first time ever, to just see if I could make the chain shot. At first, the computer didn't want to process anything that I did, which got a little annoying. But eventually, it cooperated and I made a little video of the chain shot, showing how it stays together and reacts. ^_^

Completed head (Finally)

I have finally finished my head. Well, as much of it as I am going to do anyway. The way that I have created the head has made some parts of this massively harder than they needed to be. Ideally, I would like to start the head again and make it differently to how I have made it now, Mainly by creating a less complicated mesh. But I don't want this head to be eating up any more of my time when I need to be working on the battle.

So this is the cylindrical map that I used to to apply to my face with an Unwrap UVW modifier. The lighting of the 2 different photo's is slightly different, so the blend didn't go as cleanly as I would have hoped.

This is the final render of my face with the Unwrap UVW modifier applied. As close as I can get it to look like myself.

And finally, some playing around with some hair. ^_^

Finally, something going to plan!

Well I managed to get a version of max 9, so I am back on track. I am having a little problem though. Something very weird keeps happening with max with windows turning invisible. I think it may be a problem with my graphics card or something.

But anyway, the reason for this post, I've made a barrel and also had a little play around with some volume lighting and some smokey scenes.

This is a close up of the barrel.

Here is a little scene with barrels with normal lighting.

Then here is the same scene but with volumetric lights turned on with the noise modifier thing in there to make it look a little smokey.

I didn't like how crisp that foreground shadow is behind the first barrel, but I am unsure of how to fix this at the moment. So I will leave it until Friday.

Next up, ammunition, driftwood and gunpowder sacks!

Good site

Just found this site while doing some research. It contains a lot of useful information and many photos of the rooms inside HMS Victory. http://www.daliatrevino.com/Nelson&TheRoyalNavy.htm

Problems with version compatability

I have discovered that if I work on anything in the room we have on a friday on max 9, then I am unable to open this file at home on max 8. Even if the file is originally created in max8, then edited in the newer version.
I'm not sure if it is just a case of me missing something that would make this work with my version, so does anyone know a solution to this problem?

In the meantime, I think I will just, ahem, cough, 'aquire' max version 9. With money, of course. ;)

Boning and skinning

After making a simple body, boning and then skinning it, I have started to have a go at some simple animation. I have realised that the animation takes a lot more work to get some realistic movements than I had first thought. It also takes a lot of tweaking with the envelopes to get the body to move properly and not crease on the joints. A little more work and I might post some test animations.

Progress

After a seriously long and heavy night of working I have managed to made some good progress with the model. I went over the face topology with the line tool until I had the whole face covered and then converted it to an editable polly. I then attached all of the shapes and welded the vertices. I then went about the tricky process of pulling all of the different vertices back to relation to the side on photo to give the mask its depth. After pulling all of the points back from the side view alone, I then went to the perspective view so that I could actually see what the mask looked like. I then went about doing some lengthy tweaking to get everything looking good. I found the cut and the remove tools extremely useful for adding in extra lines and quads once the mask was in its 3d form to make parts of it easier to manipulate. I remember seeing James using soft selection to tweak his mask, but I preferred to just move the vertices one at a time personally.
But anyway, after a good 4 or so hours of work I've come up with this, please let me know what you think.

Face Topologies

My first attempt at the face topologies didn't go too well, as the original lines that I had drawn on my face didn't work out too well when it came to making the mesh in max. So I have gone back and started over. I have taken new photo's and made a new topology. This is what it looks like so far:

So I'm going to put this back into max and hope that it goes a little better this time. ^_^

Face modelling

We did some of the basics of face modelling in the first lesson last week. This is the first time I have done any modelling and mapping of faces in this way. We had to draw lines along the main features of the face, like the cheek bones and the lines around the mouth. We then made up the face into quads so that we could use this as a guideline for when we put the faces into max. I'm looking forward to finishing off the modelling and pulling the mesh into 3d so that we can apply the skin.

First thoughts

My first thoughts of the subject are a little mixed. I think that the topic that has been chosen has a lot of scope for some really creative work that will allow us to use all of our skills. But I am also a little worried by the amount of work that the subject entails. I am really looking forward to getting stuck into this work though. This should be fun! :D